The range of television content that is available to users is ever increasing. For example, users initially received television content from an over-the-air broadcast which was captured by an antenna. Subsequently, delivery techniques and the content available via these techniques have continued to expand, from cable television to digital cable television, satellite television, and so on. As these techniques have expanded so to has the amount of content available to users such that users that were initially provided with a handful of channels via the over-the-air broadcast are now able to access hundreds of channels that may have different types of television content, such as television programs, video-on-demand, and so forth.
One technique that has been developed to help the users navigate through this vast amount of content is through the use of an electronic program guide (EPG). The EPG provides functionality similar to a printed program guide by informing the users as to which television content is available and where that television content is located, e.g., what channel is broadcasting the particular television content. The EPG may also provide additional functionality to enable users to actually navigate to particular television content represented in the EPG, cause the content to be recorded by a digital video recorder, order pay-per-view content, and so on.
To enable the users to locate, select, view and/or record particular television content of interest, techniques were developed to interact with the EPG and particular television content of interest, such as using input from a remote control to navigate the EPG and select different channels. These techniques, however, were limited in that both the functionality of the remote control and the EPG were fixed at the time of manufacture. Therefore, the user was unable to customize the functional capability of a remote control to interact with an EPG and/or content according to preferred input techniques, which may be frustrating to the user and detract from the user experience.